We Failures
by TheSoulOfAStrawberry
Summary: Everyone gets it wrong once in a while. Not every single waking moment of their life.


**Wow, I don't know what even happened here. I just wanted to study Arthur's character, but it's Sunday and I'm in a really bad mood, and it turns out, even lovable old Arthur can't escape a writer's schadenfreude antics. So, this is kind of Arthur's very angsty life-story, for some reason. Which many people have attempted before, sure, and, idk, I don't think for a moment that Arthur would always be the victim, y'know? Warnings for just about everything under the sun, by the way. Particularly the end, I think.**

**Also, if you're reading this, you're probably interested in the Cabin Pressure artbook a bunch of Tumblr artists are apparently doing. Google it! It's kind of cool.**

The first time Arthur had failed, he'd been four. Not many people remembered being four, it turned out, but people did remember being embarrassed; Martin would go salmon pink, for example, whenever Douglas brought up that time with Hester McCauley or Linda from Cal Air. Or pretty much any woman he'd ever crossed paths with.

People also tended to remember the first day of school. Secondary school, in most cases, but, in Arthur's case, it was his first day in the big primary school in Daventry.

Playgroup had been different. There hadn't been so many scary faces, so many older pupils glaring at him. There had been no itchy jumpers or shirt collars, and he hadn't been expected to keep track of a whole book bag of books- books that he couldn't read, not now, not ever: too hard. Playgroup had been small and friendly: they'd done drawings and traced big curvy letters with Miss Potts, and there was that one occasion upon which the teaching assistant, whose name Arthur chronically forgot, bought in some frogspawn, and they'd spent the whole week watching and waiting the tank, until there was the tiniest, almost ephemeral ripple on the water: and out popped a single tadpole, followed by another, and other, until the whole surface was alive with wriggling, and Sam, Poppy, Sayed, Billy, Rose and Arthur were all shrieking with delight.

Naomi hadn't gone to the same nursery school as Arthur, but a Montessori school, somewhere in the county. Naomi had curly blonde hair and a hairband that matched her blue-checked school dress, as well as a wicked little grin, that curved into a horrible laugh when she caught Arthur failing to tie his shoe laces. Then she'd pushed him over, and continued laughing as he wiped his scratched nose on the cuff of that awful, awful jumper.

Arthur later dated Naomi, when he was fifteen. He wasn't sure why- they'd both lost the puppy fat and the backwards-threes, but every now and again, when Naomi was gloating about how she was going to become a lawyer and study at Cambridge, Arthur remembered the afternoon in September 1987 that he'd spent crying behind the steps at the back of the school, where no one would find him until the bell went for home-time at three-twenty.

He hadn't waited long for his second failure. It had only taken a term for a letter of concern- something else they'd not bothered with at nursery- to be sent home with Arthur, in a white envelope marked "To the Parent/Guardian of Arthur Shappey". Arthur, however, being unable to read, and equally unable to fathom why such an important looking letter had been sent home in his book-bag, dutifully handed the letter to him Mum, who sat him on her knee while she opened it with her finger.

The contents of the note, it turned out, were bad. Bad enough for his Dad to yell at his Mum, enough to make her cry and cry and cry, sat on Arthur's bed, clutching the letter in one hand and her left eye, which had gone a funny colour, in the other. Worse still, that he'd had to stay after school on the following Wednesday, after all the children had gone home and the teachers called each other "Janet", "Steve" and "Guy"; as if they had real names. He'd helped the cleaner tidy the Rainbow Room, while his Mum and Dad sat with Mrs Kneen, and raised their voices.

There had been a deathly silence in the car on the way home. Arthur had watched the trees out of the window, and planes from Stansted and Cranfield and Fitton criss-crossing the sky with white scars. His face was red, and his eyes were hot- burning hot: he'd never realised tears could be so hot. He wasn't sure what the meeting was about, but, in retrospect, he could pin-point it as the beginning of the realisation that he would never, ever, be as smart as the other kids. He now also realised that the feeling that had made him feel sick in the pit of his stomach, was inexorable shame.

There were many, many other times like that in primary school, but they'd, quite thankfully, reduced to a mere haze in his head- thoughts and memories of extra-lessons, private tutors, concerned reports and diabolical grades, just out of reach in his mind; like fingertips reaching up to the sky, but not quite managing to pinch a cloud between his thumb and index finger, or scrape the azure under his fingernail.

He wasn't terrible at everything. He was very good at art: his reports always tried to focus on this as a plus, beneath the phrases like "Arthur's spelling and word formation is a cause for concern" and "Arthur is having troubles interacting with his peers". It wasn't a plus for Arthur- by the time he was sixteen, he was only ever drawing in a notepad by the light of the streetlight outside, from Polaroids slipped to him in Physics by a girl with lopsided hair and NHS glasses. Art, or Fine Art, as Polaroid Girl had always called it, was as good as forbidden in the Shappey household, as it meant Arthur was using his time irresponsibly, when he could have been studying.

Besides Art, Arthur was also good at acting. One of his friends, who left to live in Ireland in Year Two, Kitty, once said that this was because he tried so hard to fit in all the time, that acting had become natural. Arthur wasn't sure what she meant by that, but, as it turned out, he'd never gotten the chance to ask her.

For one, he didn't fit in at all- he couldn't keep up with the conversations of others, about TV shows and books and lessons, and when everyone else was spending their time sitting on the wall in the yard, or playing tag, Arthur was slumped dismally over an impossible maths problem, back to the window.

People found his acting funny. He found it exhilarating when, all of a sudden, he was the centre of attention in the classroom, and children were jostling him, asking him to do an impression of a character from Star Wars, or a robot, or Bruce Forsyth. His Year Four teacher put him in the Christmas concert, playing Gabriel in a foil halo and a dress made out of an old bed-sheet, and it was nothing short of brilliant, standing up and saying his lines to the crowd of teachers, children, and later, parents, and watching them coo and smile as he waved his hand wildly in the air in rejoice for the Baby Jesus, who was a one-eyed doll wrapped in a muslin square.

It had gone too perfectly. Even as an eight-year-old, Arthur walked off, stage left, and knew there was something bad coming.

And it did, right as he was thinking it: the ground. So quickly, that he didn't have time to break his fall. His nose exploded with blood and pain, and his ears rang with the titters of his classmates as the bed-sheet became splattered scarlet.

The teacher- he didn't know which one, his eyes had gone cloudy in his efforts not to cry in front of everyone- rushed him away, into the Year Six classroom, but the damage had been done. Any dreams he might have had of becoming a famous actor one day, were on the floor, and the four hundred and twelve pupils at the school, and the fifty or so parents that had turned up to watch the performance, wouldn't pain themselves to watch their step. Then, as if to add insult to injury, his Mum and Dad didn't turn up for another fifteen minutes, apparently, he heard later, because his Dad hadn't wanted to make it obvious that Arthur was theirs. The way he looked at his son, wearing a sheet and his school-shoes, holding a bloody toilet-tissue to his face, tears rolling down his cheeks. Things were never really the same after that Christmas: Arthur would have preferred still getting the insults. Any insult was better than the heavy silence that enveloped him, the exasperated sighs and the way his father made his demands quietly and slowly, as if the entire conversation was balancing on a knife-edge.

Arthur, also, refocused his dreams to suit his father's ideals- abandoning his daydreams of becoming an actor of an artist, and decided, on the day his father bought a Lockheed McDonnell 312, to become a pilot.

High school, he'd hoped, would be different. Unlike the primary school uniform, which had seen years of bullying, tears and general humiliation, he wore his tie and blazer proudly, if not awkwardly. High school had different classes, fresh faces and new places to explore, like libraries, and the café just outside of the school. More importantly, he'd been promised that, as a public school, he'd have a better chance of success, and that no-one from his primary school was going there. Furthermore, it was all the way in Northampton, meaning everyday was an adventure, and, although he hated to admit it, he liked the idea of leaving before anyone else got up, and not returning until after half-five.

As Arthur had later mentioned, in passing, to Douglas and Martin, Arthur's high-school was ghastly. There was simply no other word for it. The milieu was nice enough- kind of Gothic Revival, genuine or not, it didn't matter much, with extensive grounds and the high-street open to all students during the luxurious hour-and-a-half long lunch period. That was, pretty much, the only consolation for going to the school.

With a few exceptions over the years, the pupils at Northampton City High School were generally appalling. The environment was cutthroat, in the way you made, or more often bought, friends, yet the ambition to work was almost non-existent. Arthur, still focused on being able to work at the same level as his peers, if only to get his Mum to stop making that face she did when Arthur was still struggling quietly with his homework at ten o'clock in the evening, had his work set on fire; his school-bag thrown into the fountain, and got locked in a store-cupboard with another boy, something for which he got into a great deal of trouble for.

No one cared if he wanted to be a pilot. No one cared where the bruises came from. No one cared if he was struggling, if he was alone, if he was failing.

Maybe it was worth it, he thought, to be able to bring home a sparkling grade-sheet in his later terms.

Then again, maybe it wasn't. After all, the grades and the uniform were just the surface- the hours he spent in classes learning French and Chemistry and Religious Studies were becoming just as bad as the hours he spent cuddling Snoopadoop while his Mum and Dad screamed at each other downstairs.

He had a few friends. He even had a girlfriend, for a while. A short while.

His next, possibly biggest, failure, came when he dropped out of school at sixteen.

His initial plan was to move out. He sold some of his things that his parents wouldn't miss, sold some of his larger drawings, before they collected too much dust underneath his mattress, did as much work in cafes and bars (when he could look old enough- the trick was, he found, to shave, no matter how often he cut himself and how many tissues he used). He found he liked doing the work- meeting people for just a few moments in their day, not having to engage with anyone further than a smile and "What can I get for you, sir?".

It didn't earn him enough to move out, though. Or enough to fund his own course at Oxford Air Training, or Cranfield Flying School.

He did in a sense, though, move somewhere. In a cataclysmic showdown, worthy of the title he'd since given it, of his two-hundredth failure. Admittedly, his Mum didn't see it that way- she would remind him of it, when it had been a long week in GERT-I, and he was sat staring into space on the sofa, clutching a lukewarm cup of tea. Martin and Douglas would laugh, if they knew what his Mum could be like sometimes- soft, motherly, protective.

Do you remember, she'd say quietly, when you saved my life?

He remembered how horrible it felt to see the people he had undoubtedly loved- despite everything- shatter in front of him. He remembered his father spitting in his face, red-faced, face-to-face with Arthur, standing in front of his Mum. The way he'd felt afterwards, when she'd finally said the D-word, and his Dad had stormed out, yelling about lawyers. How he'd never wanted to feel angry again (and indeed, never had: both a great relief and an inhumane example of self-denial), and how he'd yelled at his mother for the first time in his life. He can't remember what he said, but they agreed together not to go to hospital.

Hence, his nose always looked a bit like that.

Once the aftermath had cleared from his face, his Mum drove him the two-hours to Oxford. It had been his one chance, one opportunity, to reach for his dream of becoming a pilot- and boy, was he close, getting to the interview stage for what seemed like the first time in his life. And then he went and screwed it all up: all the studying, all the late nights, all the revision, just for him to get back into the car, silently, and smile serenely, while his mother died a little inside.

That wasn't the least of it. When his Mum won the plane in the divorce, and he helped he design logos and spread-sheets and got it all wrong like he had in the scarce few lessons he'd had about computing in school, he felt that, maybe, this was his chance to stop being a failure. Prove he was more.

And then he spilt coffee on the first pilot they employed, who promptly left. Not that Arthur had liked him anyway, but it took them three weeks to find another. Who left after four months.

He failed the City and Guilds he was sent on.

His Mum hired a new pilot. This one was professional and strict, and Arthur didn't like him at all- not that he said so. His job, after all, was to serve passengers: something he was becoming alright at, even if he did break the latch on the trolley once. If his Mum was on-board, he could get her to do the coffee for the flight-deck. On the other hand, perhaps he should have said something, because it took a while before he got fired, after accusing a Pakistani passenger of being a terrorist, who then (quite rightly, in Arthur's mind, even if he wasn't sure how it was possible) threatened to sue.

He then crashed his car. It was an instant write-off, though his Mum didn't say too much about it, after a doctor let slip to her that the car was in a very strange position for what Arthur had said was him swerving to avoid a goat in the road. Or maybe she could just see that losing the car, and, temporarily while he recovered, his job, was painful enough.

He tried to change a few things about his life after that. He vowed, every day, to do something nice for someone: not to get something in return- after all, some days it was just his mother he saw, and she already gave him a roof over his head. Some days, it was for girls in Fitton, and he earnt a date or two- never any more. Sometimes it was for people in general, so much so, that he got to get to know a lot of people in his area quite well, which, for the first time in his live, made him feel safe. On the days where he could walk down the high-street in Fitton, and be waved at by no fewer than seven people, he felt like things were finally working out. And then he'd grin back.

Douglas would be right to think of him as a failure. After all, the first time Arthur met Douglas, he was on the floor. Douglas, it seemed, had finished his interview, walked out of the room and gone flying into Arthur, who fell backwards into the filing cabinet and landed neatly (besides his flyaway hair) on the floor.

Arthur had just garbled an apology as Douglas held out his hand, saying something smooth that didn't really register at the time in Arthur's brain, before smiling weakly, and strolled out of the Portakabin, leaving a kind of empty feeling in the room behind him.

What did you think of him, his mother had asked as she appeared by his side.

Brilliant, he'd replied.

And then, he thought he heard her say, Good, because he's the best we can do. But she was already walking away, looking sadly at the accounts scattered across her desk, so Arthur couldn't be sure. She'd picked up the letter they'd received that morning through the door of the house they could no longer afford: the one Arthur had pretended not to see, the one offering to buy GERT-I again.

Arthur liked Douglas; and Douglas seemed, every now and again, to see something in Arthur that no one else had, even if he didn't say anything. Arthur just knew because sometimes, he caught Douglas watching him as he did something normal like making coffee (which he had perfected into an Art, or Fine Art, if Polaroid Girl was to be believed on such matters) or saying goodbye to passengers.

He managed to convince his Mum to let him drive again after a year, and paid for a trip to Brighton, where they'd been when Arthur was twelve, and his Dad was on a week golfing with some of his posh friends in Portugal. They ate ice-cream and fish-and-chips, looked for crabs on the shore, and skimmed stones- something that his mother, for an older woman, was surprisingly good at. He thought the sea-air and time away from the company and the house did her good.

Then came Martin. Martin, the freckly, delivery-man-cum-unpaid-pilot. Not that he was supposed to know that, but he did check the accounts, just in case, and he might have listened in to the interview, unwilling to have to make his opinion clear this time by colliding with him. Martin Crieff was nervous, fidgety, and his tie had a toothpaste stain on it. He also looked just as lost as Arthur had done once.

Arthur quite liked Martin. Which, he supposed, was a good thing, since his Mum hired him. And, even though Arthur managed to embarrass Martin on his first day, by pointing out that he was wearing odd socks, Martin liked Arthur.

Maybe it was because Douglas was more his Mum's age than his own, or because he was smarter than Martin and Arthur. Then there was the fact that, underneath it all, Arthur was just as tied to his job as Martin, and didn't get paid either. It was a sort of understanding between them- nothing much said, but a smile, the way Arthur knew when Martin wanted (or needed) his coffee (most of the time) and how he liked it, and the way both of them could tell when Douglas had gone a bit far with the other. Because they understood, and, in a way Arthur had never really considered before, he really, really cared.

Which is probably why it distressed them both so much, when Arthur threw the door to Martin's en suite open, and found him as he did.

"How long," Martin breathed, "Have you been holding all that in?"

Arthur smiled. It was one of those smiles that made you realise what the narrator in _The Great Gatsby_ was thinking- whatever his name was.

"With all due respect, Skip, I could probably ask you the same question," Arthur replied, checking the haphazard bandages around the other man's left wrist assiduously. It worried him that there was already a tiny spot of blood on the bandage- that was bad, wasn't it?

"No… No… But… I mean…" He sighed. "Acting? Art? A-And… I always wondered why your nose was… S-S-Sorry."

"We need to go to a hospital, Skip. I brought my car, if you like."

"How did you know…" Either he didn't want to finish his sentence, or couldn't.

"I asked the students to keep an eye, Skip. It was a bit Douglas' idea too, y'know."

"D-Douglas?"

"Yeah, y'know. Douglas Richardson, you first off-"

"I know who Douglas is, Arthur."

"Right-ho," he said, sounding flat.

Martin pursed his lips, his light eyebrows furrowing together to make a horribly pained expression. Arthur found himself wishing he'd bought some custard-creams, because Martin looked peaky, to say the least, and they happened to be his favourites.

"So…?"

"Hmm?"

"Hospital, Skip."

"I don't want to."

"But I've run out of bandages," Arthur stated, and a slow grimace spread across Martin's face as Arthur got to his feet pointedly. It was Arthur, there was no way out of it.

He acquiesced, taking hold of Arthur's outstretched hand and launching himself into the air.

It seemed, however, that blood-loss had taken its toll on the young captain, and his vision became clouded with black spots, reaching for him and crowding his vision. He felt himself falling.

And yet, there were two strong arms, holding him up, holding his left arm in the air like he'd been taught on his training course, supporting Martin on his shoulder. His vision cleared, and he could smell lavender-scented Bold Two-in-One.

"Arthur," he sniffed, "You're not a failure. Not in any universe, ever."

"I know," he replied quietly, as they began to make their way down from the attic, turning the light on as he went. There was a small pause, in which Arthur took the faintest of breaths, and Martin thought of all the things that had ever gone wrong for Arthur- and yet it was him, here, being so completely pathetic. How much courage, it must have taken Arthur, to muster up those two words.

"You're not a failure either, Skip. You're brilliant."

Martin took a deep breath. The whole world took a moment, to hang in the balance: the night, the planes, the families, the tap that dripped in the Portakabin. There was a moment of waiting, for the perfect answer, the moment of truth.

He wasn't ready. It didn't matter. Arthur already knew that. But he felt he should say something- anything- anyway.

"I'm sorry."


End file.
